Op-Eds

Hey Joe, Where You Goin’ With That Pen in Your Hand?

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Joe and Jill Biden arrive at the White House. Public domain.
Joe and Jill Biden arrive at the White House. Public domain.

On his first partial day as president,  Joe Biden issued 17 “executive orders, memorandums and proclamations” — two more than America’s first five presidents issued over their 36 years in office.

Ol’ Joe obviously walked off the inaugural stage with his honeymoon plans well-laid. While I don’t personally respect presidential honeymoons for either party, I do try to look at each new president’s actions with an open mind and  search for the good.

Here are a few high points you may have missed while sipping champagne at an inaugural ball or swilling cheap beer and watching MSNBC:

First, no “national mask mandate.” That’s a good thing. It indicates an understanding that there are some limits to presidential power. Biden’s  requiring that masks be worn on federal property and by federal employees, but merely “nudging” Americans to wear masks and leaning on state and local officials to force us to do so.

This could have been far worse.  And with trial balloons on re-invoking the Defense Production Act that his predecessor also used to interfere with and screw up the market’s response to the pandemic, it will almost certainly GET worse. But it’s not worse yet.

Biden came in swinging on immigration. The Obama-Biden administration deported more immigrants than any administration in history including Donald Trump’s. Having been nearly out-Democrated by (supposedly former) Democrat Trump on immigration authoritarianism, Biden did a 180. He reinstated the controversial and legally sketchy, but at least not intentionally evil, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, urging Congress to affirm permanent residency and “paths to citizenship” for the affected folks. He reversed the Trump administration’s plans for a fraudulent census excluding non-citizens, nixed Trump’s “Muslim ban,” stopped construction on Trump’s border wall, and round-filed Trump’s fake declaration of “emergency”  used to misappropriate funds for it.

Hats off to President Biden; all that’s a good day’s work by itself!

On the environment, Biden’s actions were mixed.

He signed a letter of intent to bring the US back into the Paris Climate Accords, a useless treaty that nobody but the US (and probably not the US) ever plans to actually implement, whether its provisions are  good ideas or not.

On the other hand, he put the brakes on a couple of high-profile corporate welfare schemes: The Keystone XL pipeline and sweetheart oil and natural gas leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Environmentally justified or not, I’m always glad to see government slowing down its giveaways to big business.

No more federal discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.  A welcome no-brainer that Republicans should (but probably won’t) let shuffle off the culture war battlefield over the next four years.

A couple of lemons: He’s extending the national eviction moratorium  (apparently  already forgetting about those limits on presidential power), and still toying with direct action on student loan debt instead of pushing Congress to change bankruptcy laws to discharge that debt.

But in places Joe Biden’s first day was darn good, and it certainly could have been far worse.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Op-Eds

The Trump/Biden Handoff: Back to Business as Usual, as Usual

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Joe Biden (photo by Gage Skidmore) and Donald Trump (photo by Shealah Craighead). Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.
Joe Biden (photo by Gage Skidmore) and Donald Trump (photo by Shealah Craighead). Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

Few will find it surprising that the incoming Biden administration looks, in both form and function, a lot like the Obama administration of 2009-2017. After all, Joe Biden served as Barack Obama’s vice-president for those eight years. His staff and cabinet appointments comprise a veritable Who’s Who of Obama holdovers and members of Biden’s own political circle, built over decades in the Senate and White House.

Some might, however,  be surprised to at how closely Biden’s administration will likely resemble outgoing President Donald Trump’s, both personnel- and policy-wise. The new boss looks a lot like the old boss, minus a flair for the melodramatic. And the old boss looked a lot like the older boss, too.

Trump’s 2016 campaign, and his actions in office, were a classic case of multiple personality disorder.

He ran on “draining the swamp,” all the while recruiting support from, then staffing up with, the usual gang of ward-heelers and lobbyists.

He ran on a less interventionist foreign policy, when he wasn’t bragging about being “the most militaristic” candidate and promising to “rebuild” an already bloated military. Then he escalated every war he inherited from his predecessor (and re-booted the old US war in Somalia), after which he tried to pass of his draw-downs to 2016 troop levels in Syria and Afghanistan as “withdrawing” and did his damnedest to bait Iran into a new war.

He ran on cutting taxes. His income tax cuts were intended to be temporary (the bill doubled the standard deduction for two years while eliminating the personal exemption permanently — Congress made things permanent later), included a “soak the rich” scheme (the State And Local Tax deduction cap), and were more than eclipsed by the tariffs he levied on American buyers of foreign goods to “protect” the American industries with the most effective lobbyists.

He ran on cutting regulations, and issued an executive order that he claimed required federal bureaucracies to repeal two regulations for each new one. It really only required those bureaucracies to “identify” two regulations “for” repeal, not actually repeal them. As of three days before his inauguration, the Federal Register included 1,079,651 regulations.  On December 31, 2020, that number was 1,090,371.

He ran on cutting entitlements and “welfare,” then presided over the highest levels of both since the New Deal. Not reluctantly, but joyfully. And not solely due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but starting with lavish farm subsidies to off-set the damage his trade wars did to American agriculture.

On the “culture war” side, his embrace of identity politics differed from the American pseudo-“left” version only in terms of the complexions, sexual orientations, and gender identities of those he championed versus those he condemned.

Even on his signature issue, immigration, he came in second — behind Barack Obama and Joe Biden — on numbers of immigrants deported.

The differences between Donald Trump and Joe Biden are and always have been soap opera differences rather than substantive differences. Americans looking for more freedom from either were and are looking in the wrong places. Business as usual never paused.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Op-Eds

The No Fly List: More Dangerous than the Capitol Rioters

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Tear gas outside the United States Capitol on 6 January 2021. Photo by Tyler Merbler. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
Tear gas outside the United States Capitol on 6 January 2021. Photo by Tyler Merbler. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

As I write this, the Capitol Hill riot of January 6 is enjoying its extended 15 minutes of fame, complete with straight-faced comparisons to December 7, 1941 and September 11, 2001.

In hindsight, it will hopefully (and hopefully quickly) shrink to its real-life proportions: A few thousand hysterical Donald Trump supporters, and likely at most a few dozen truly dangerous thugs, protested against what they claimed was a stolen election. Then they stormed and vandalized a building, scared some politicians, and killed a cop (who turned out to be a Trump supporter himself).

No, it wasn’t pretty. Neither was the March 1, 1954 attack on the Capitol in which Puerto Rican nationalists shot and wounded five members of Congress, or Frank Eugene Corder’s September 12, 1994 suicide by plane on the White House’s south lawn. Last time I checked, those dates were no more occasions of somber remembrance than January 6 is likely to become. In the grand scheme of things, they were all teapot tempests.

The real and lasting damage of the Capitol riot will come not from the riot itself but from its exploitation by authoritarians of all stripes. The Rahm Emanuel strategy — “never allow a good crisis to go to waste when it’s an opportunity to do things that you had never considered, or that you didn’t think were possible” — is in full play, in the form of “let’s stack new evil ideas on top of existing evil ideas.”

One such new evil idea, advocated by politicians on both sides of the partisan aisle, is adding those accused of participating in the Capitol riot to the Terrorist Screening Center’s “No Fly List.”

The No Fly List was sold as a way of protecting US air traffic from terrorist attack by barring suspected terrorists from flying. In reality, it’s just a secret government enemies list that’s grown from 16 names to tens of thousands since the 9/11 attacks.

You have no way of knowing if you’re on the list until and unless you’re prevented from boarding a plane. You have no way of finding out WHY you’re on the list even then. You can politely ask the US Department of Homeland Security to remove you from the list, and they can politely tell you no. If you have the means, you can go to court, maybe win, maybe lose. The US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia ruled the list unconstitutional in 2019, but the list is still there.

One previous item from the Bag of Stupid No Fly List Tricks was barring those on the No Fly List from purchasing firearms.  Fortunately that scheme has repeatedly failed (despite support from, among others, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, and pseudo-Libertarian 2016 vice-presidential candidate William Weld). It was a bad idea. So is this one.

The power to prevent a person from traveling without even charging, let alone convicting, that person of a crime (or even notifying the victim!) isn’t a power we should have even considered letting government have at all.  Rather than allow its expansion, it’s time to demand its abolition.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY